Archive for the 'YSE' Category
A long time!
Peace
It has been almost a year since anything has been posted on here, and what a year it has been. With all the ups and downs, life continues for those of us still living.
In that year a lot of external work has been done by YSE which has unfortunately stumped the progress of internal projects that were in the pipeline. The Hijri Date project which was initiated at the start of 2005 has steadily gained momentum and was generally a success with many websites adopting the service and idea. This is reflected by the number hits to the server - This month alone over 90,000 hits shows that the include script is being used.
As usual, the 2007 trend graph shows a continual rise which is always a good thing!
Though this may look good, there is a lot of work that needs to be done and we hope that in the coming months we will be able to facilitate for the development of new projects as well as the continual improvement of those still running.
The Usayd Network has finally decided to do undergo a facelift and 100% optimisation. A large proportion of this has taken place with the shift from an old, unstable and clogged up WordPress install to a brand new setup. The theme is currently in development - focused on simple yet effective design technique.
So keep your eyes open 
A look at 2006
2006 was a very busy year for the Usayd Corporation, most significantly the merger with Younis Server Enterprise which actually took place in the last week of 2005. Of course there have been some downfalls this year too, some aspirations are yet to be met, however there have been some surprising developments. Lets take a look at the statistics:
Visitors
The rise in visitors from 2005 -> 2006 was huge, with 2006 receiving an average of 2000 visitors per day which was on a continual rise until half way through October where there was a drop in activity from the company.
Bandwidth
YSE has been the basis for all major bandwidth consuming activity so its unsurprising that 250,000 MB were used in 2006, an increase of about 200% from 2005. Something in the average of 1GB transfer per day.
This leads on to the two major projects of 2006:
The downloads section was introduced as an experimental project to test out just how useful having a file storage dump would be. It turns out that the idea was extremely successful, providing only 50 files we have had a massive 6000 downloads in 2006 alone, which comes to an average of 120 downloads per file.
Surprisingly the most popular download was the Advent T9 driver pack compiled by the Usayd Corporation, which boasted a huge 1600 downloads, almost a third of the total downloads with a full five star rating and has reached approximately the 14th most popular result for an Advent T9 google search.
As the downloads section was intentionally used to help people with HP iPaq RX3715 filestore issues, the second and third most popular files are ROM images for this device, and fourth is the Bluetooth headphones (AD2P) drivers.
In fifth place is the specialised Islamic Praise plugin by the Usayd Corporation, which has been quite popular for WordPress users. There are plans to further this project though the work is spread over a huge area. As the project is open source, any contributions whether financial or physical (programming etc.) would be gratefully accepted.
This project was again rather experimental, however it has proven to have been the landmark for 2006. The Hijri Date service is currently used by thousands of websites internationally and has boasted a huge popularity. It is unfortunate that the Hijri Date wizard was actually finished back in April 06, however it has still not been made public due to hosting problems. The future is looking bright though!
Dedicated Hosting
The Usayd Corporation have been moving their sites over to dedicated hosting. This process has been slowed by a few issues however we are aiming for stable ground by February 2007.
We recommend Fuzzy Hosting for excellent hosting:
Keep your eyes open for some new developments in 2007!
HijriDate Wizard Completed!
One thing I’ve realised about working a project is the initial spur that gets you going. When you have an idea and a vision you can really feel determined to get it done. Often you loose this momentum as you encounter hurdles and problems that slow you down. This is the first time where I’ve decided that I wanted to make something and I’ve done it (with some help) in only a few days.
Local testing helps immensely when working on a new project - why? Because you can test your script in seconds, and the best way to see if something works is to keep testing it. I’ve been using XAMPP with PHP5, Apache2 and MySQL5 on one of my Windows machines to get the job done. Alternatively if your running Linux or Mac then you (should) have these facilities only a few clicks away.
I also find that looking at other open source scripts can be extremely useful. You might know how to do something one way but you may find that someone else has done it in a more efficient and easier way then yourself. The great thing about open source is that you are no obliged to use someone elses scripts, and if you do use it then you are free to change it as much as you like to suit your needs (depending on what license it’s under).
Anyway back to the HijriDate Wizard. It has been completed and is working really well, but - yes there is a but. This webhost is not currently supporting ‘FreeType’. What does that mean? Well basically the script will not run on here. I have it running on an Usayd Networks server but I am not allowed to release it publicly till it can be hosted here. The script has been tested by around 25 people so far and the evaluation has been very positive. I’m afraid all I can offer to you right now is a screenshot of it in action, and I will keep emailing this pathetic webhost to enable FreeType.
